Tuesday, 3 July 2012

Until comparatively recently you'd have been totally forgiven for describing Kempt as a Flash house. Although I'm definitely not a huge Adobe fan* and I acknowledge that the player has a few issues, I'm not ashamed to say that Macromedia (not Adobe) did a brilliant job of creating a revolutionary tool which made rich application/game development truly accessible for the first time and sparked a decade of unprecedented creativity. But... times, and opinions do change my friends...

Increasingly Kempt's success comes not from Flash projects but from what we're doing with iOS/mobile games. Take our recent release for Red Bull: Kart Fighter - World Tour for example: unfortunately I'm limited in terms of what I can reveal outside of this press release but suffice to say that the iOS version alone garnered over 4 million installs in it's first month 500k of which are in the UK and that's without any media support at all - in fact the campaign hasn't really even started yet. Whilst we can still generate significant numbers with Flash games it has to be said that we'd struggle to generate these kinds of numbers in that time period.

Added to this I had a really amazing chat with David Helgason from Unity at GameHorizon last week, he's a really inspiring character and it was fabulous to hear his insight on the landscape, the challenges for Flash and his vision for the future of Unity. Whilst Unity comes at the problem from a very different point of view David speaks eloquently about exactly the same thing that sparked my original passion for Flash - the democracy of game development. I get the feeling that there'll be very exciting things to come for their technology and I very-much look forward to seeing it develop.

So, while people still love flash games and I don't subscribe to slightly naive statements like "Flash will be dead within the year" I do think that the world has changed radically (for the better) for us developers in the last couple of years. We now have the luxury of choice and the benefit of opportunities that we never had before. And I will say that, unless Adobe can find a way to both up their game and improve their developer relations, Flash's days are indeed numbered.